10 Steps To Do A Brand Review
SP
He's Nifty's resident drawing & marketing guy
10 Steps To Do A Brand Review
Doing a brand review or overhaul is no small feat. With items such as domain transfers, social grids, analytics & CRM data as well as colour palettes, one can easily find oneself in the midst of a overhaul jungle.
If you’re like us, you’ve overhauled a few brands and have experienced many of the pitfalls that come with this process. From losing data to inconsistent branding, things can spiral out of control fast.
But why even do a brand overhaul? There are many reasons, such as staying current and reflecting new values. Whatever your reasoning might be, here are 10 steps to help guide you on your brand overhaul journey.
Step 1 - lay down goals + possible issues
Definement of your goals and objectives is crucial. Goals are the overall milestone you would like to reach, and objectives are quantifiable goals that you can set down and reach systematically.
For instance, a goal could be to be the best digital agency in cape town. While the objectives paired with this goal could be to grow your retainer customer base by 25% and increase market share by 20%. Setting goals has been scientifically proven to increase the value of output by 18%, thus getting these in place is crucial in the early stages.
Step 2 - Assess current state
Go through all your current files that will be overhauled, in other words redesigned and replaced, and follow the current thought path or customer expereince flow.
For example, find your old UX flowcharts for the website (or create quick new ones using Figma) and analyse the original website flow plan. Reacquaint yourself with the thought process and decisions you made when designing (or guiding the designer) on your old site.
Look at the CI manual and brand review guidelines of your old brand, scan through it and determine what the key points are. Why did you make certain decisions for the brand, what was your goal with it? Has it changed, and if so why?
Another important thing to do is to create a map of your current MarTech stack, as this almost always needs attention during an overhaul. Do an audit of your stack to see what services you arent utilising fully and which can be switched out or removed. Especially if you are paying for some of them, you need to optimise your stack to work for you as efficiently as possible.
If you’re looking for a free way to visualise your MarTech stack, check this out..
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Step 3 - make a plan/schedule for your brand review
Now that you’ve gotten down and dirty with your old website, brand and martech stack, you know exactly where to go with the brand overhaul. Before you jump right in though, consider this famous quote:
To keep old Benjamin happy, lets start with setting up some documents to help with planning the brand overhaul.
First, lay out all the main tasks that need to be done. I love using a classic piece of paper and a pen for this, but Leonardo also works well. Break down each task into smaller pieces, until you get to something with a verb. Then you know you have something you can assign to someone in your team.
Second, it’s Team time! Layout your team and their skillset. Using something like Airtable, create a base for each task such as Branding or Web Design. Create table rows for each of the “verbs” and Assign the verbs to each team member. You can also use something like WBS to do this! Airtable also allows for a Gannt chart with its paid features, which makes it super easy to track progress!
Step 4 - design
Now that the planning is done, we can start with the design of the website flowchart or UX.
You can simply go ahead with a basic flowchart, or use Figma. Remember to consult the old flowchart from the old site, as well as any additional notes you might have made during Step 2.
If rebranding is also part of your brand review, remember to use your old brand and new moodboards as guides. Also we’ve found that it works well to create at lease 5 different versions/iterations of your new brand attemtps and send them to friends/family/coworkers to get their honest opinion.
Also, think about the usage of your brand or the newly intended use. Will it be displayed on illuminated signage? Will it have to be lazer-cut out of wood? Will it have to be animated? Thinking of these things while designing your new brand will help you stay within your set goals and objectives.
One last thing about design, is to consider marketing metrics (buyer persona, market segment, etc.) when designing both website UX and branding. What does your target demographic look like? What age are they? What are their interests and spending habits? Focussing on demographic, geographical, behavioural and psychographic segmentation will help you design your brand overhaul to reap maximum rewards and build lasting customer experiences.
Step 5 - Announce the brand review!
Now that your ducks are mostly in a row, go ahead and generate some excitement around the brand overhaul.
Create some content to market, and send out a newsletter with links to these items. If you have a brand new domain and arent too worried about losing some website traffic temporarily, setup a coming soon page with deadline and email signup. Target to this page with all your mails and social media posts. Remember to segment these email signups under a different tag (if your’re using mailchimp for example) to keep things organised once you launch and are planning to send out mailers to these new signups only.
Step 6 - Transfer of data
This is a step that we always left until the last moment, and it only served to cause headache and stress the more we left it.
With regards to the website, make sure your domain transfer has been initiated, your new hosting is setup, your old website has been backed up and you can access the backend of your new website (cpanel, etc.)
For the designs, acquire the vector or high resolution files from the designers, as well as the CI manual. Remember to have the designers embed images that have been inserted into Adobe Illustrator files and After Effects Files (this has been a big issue on our last overhaul). If there are lots of animation files, try and collect dependencies and save them in a different folder. We’ll go over this in a future blog.
Step 7 - Development + testing
This phase is pretty self explanatory. Just go through the normal (and sometime tedious) processes of website development. This includes building the site from scratch or using a CMS such as wordpress or shopify, using themes to make things a little faster, designing (or capturing) new content custom tailored to each page of the site, and setting up website forms.
Oh, and done forget about fixing responsiveness, and optimising the website speed and SEO, all while considering the flow & integration with the brand colour & style. Wow! Remember to refer to the Brand & brand guidelines (CI Manual) often. I like to print it out and keep it on my desk.
Also, remember to get visual and experience feedback early and often. Test your contact forms many times. Soft paranoia is your friend here. If you’re using a CRM to capture data, remember to segment according to the different placement of each form and the page it refers to. If you have 10 forms on your site and you dont know which submission came from which form, things might get confusing fast.
Step 8 - Soft Launch
Doing a soft launch isnt as necessary if you did your homework, but we still encourage it from time to time. Sometimes you literally need someone completely random and new to find a bug in your site before you start creatin custom utm marketing campaigns and ads directing traffic to pages that have broken pieces. Test test test!
Remember to test responsiveness. Google indexes for mobile 1st, so ensure everything displays well on mobile and your page speed is optimal. We like using Google Page Speed Index and diving into the “view treemap” to see exactly what is slowing down your page.
Step 9 - Hard launch
Finally the time has come! Time to go live and announce the completion of the brand review to the world.
Generate some content exclusively for the hard launch, such as a special that can run for a while, or an animation. The goal is to generate excitement and thereby word of mouth, leading to eventual conversions or brand ambassadors.
Step 10 - monitoring + optimise
Now that everything has launched, dont think that it’s set and done. Return to your new site daily to ensure everything is working fine. Use analytics to see which pages have high bounce or no traffic.
You can also keep on updating the SEO of your website well after it has launched. Use free software such as SEOSpider Screaming from to analyse your web pages and fix possible crawling issues. Remember, if Google cant crawl your site, neither can your customers!
Remember to use your CI manual and brand guidelines when generating new content for social media and your blog. Keep things consistent and coherent to establish a cohesive brand experience.
conclusion
And that’s about it! There are many more things to do when it comes to optimising and controlling your creative brand’s digital presence, but this guide should get your started on the right track. Well done on completing the Brand Review!
If any of this seems daunting or you would like us to help out in any of the steps, give us a shout and we’ll set up a meeting! We’ve overhauled many brands and are eager to help you get from point A to B as simply and effectively as possible.
